the friendly States, Assyria, Mexico, Disney World, 

• clean, well-surveilled states, dreamlike in the petroleum dawn
• 
  

where are the once secure CENTO seats of power
in which even the deceitful Shia of Persopolis

when the Shia lion lay with the Sunni lamb
Ishtar                                                                                              

descended to hell                                                                           

and came back a star; Lahore shone bright consumed by a harem of fire, the Water of Life
Wellheads of civilization distilled into lighter fluid
EtOH souses the fear inherent in mortality's every oppressive                                            moment                   
(Siduri, breaking into my parents' liquor cabinet,)

                                                                                                                     substance abuse policy objectives
Urania empties her urn on Karachi
 Ziusudra survived the flood of emotions      I didn't The canal-keepers saw their intricate network disappear, that had endured and given tongue to ungrateful millenia.  
Phantasm of hope                                                                                                                        Marshes drained to defy the elements and the index of our mortality, salinity ratio of tears
becomes Saddam's American rain of fake-fertilizer Stukas
Cleanse the law. From your lips. The network growing in the cavern of your buccal cavity
blitzkrieging the descendants of the Annunaki
I have the documents here

FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps. Obama wants a "Civilian Expeditionary Force.".


What has the Democratic Party become?

I find it symbolically apt that two and a half key Republicans have given the most eloquent and prompt praise for Obama's decision to replace McChyrstal for Petraeus. They speak for their entire party, it seems.
it is symbolically apt, perhaps, that I am not entirely sure which party they are speaking for, though this may just be my own denseness. Or maybe Obama's settlement- a "bipartisan" consensus- is coalescing. 

Though none of the senators would name specific civilian leaders who should be replaced, McCain suggested "re-uniting the Crocker-Petraeus team," a reference to former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, who served in Baghdad while Petraeus headed up military operations in the country.
The current ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry, had a notoriously rocky relationship with McChrystal.
Nevertheless, all three senators praised Obama's decision to accept McChrystal's resignation. Graham had particularly harsh words for the other military officers quoted in the piece.
"You let yourself and your Army down," he said. "The language you used, the cavalier attitude, the disrespect ... was unacceptable. This was a low point, in my view, for the armed forces in a very long time."
McCain predicted a smooth confirmation hearing for Petraeus, "probably the fastest in the history of the Armed Services Committee."

I highly doubt that this is a desirable settlement. But without question, the words of these three please him more than any others'.

Seems some CIA officers (of "mid-rank and below") are not happy with the drone program in Pakistan and elsewhere, despite the Agency's increasing use of it:
....the CIA officers expressing concern about the blowback effects of the drone policy are "mid-grade and below".
They learned about the impact of drone strikes on recruiting by extremist leaders in Pakistan from intelligence gathered by CIA and the National Security Agency, which intercepts electronic communications, according to Addicott.
They have informed high-level CIA officials about their concerns that the programme is backfiring, Addicott told IPS.
(Addicott is former legal adviser to U.S. Special Forces, and Director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University, San Antonio, TX.)
What do the "high-level CIA officials" think of its in-house data (supplied by its lower-level "drones") showing that its flagship program is backfiring?
"The people at the top are not believers [in the program]," said Addicott, referring to the CIA. "They know that the objective is not going to be achieved."
So then: Why does the program continue to escalate?
Addicott said the drone programme has been driven by President Barack Obama, rather than by the CIA. "Obama's trying to show people that we're winning," he added.
What else could the CIA do, that might be more productive?
All the other tools that might be used to try to reduce al Qaeda influence in Pakistan and elsewhere take a long time, require cooperation among multiple actors and have no powerful political constituency behind them, Zenko observed.

That last reason Zenko cites is the one that matters.

It seems a lot of people here are criticizing our President for being weak, indecisive, in BP's pocket, wanting to bomb Pakistan, wanting to bomb Iran, etc.
Well, for all President Obama's real or perceived failings,  his base has yet not collapsed. 
But Japan's PM's has.

Barack Obama , a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the mold of Henry Kissinger (who urged Nixon to engage in secret bombing of Cambodia into smoking ruins, which led to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge), has instructed the Pentagon to draw up plans to bomb Afghanistan's neighbor to the south:
The U.S. military is reviewing options for a unilateral strike in Pakistan in the event that a successful attack on American soil is traced to the country's tribal areas, according to senior military officials.

Now this is stupid and criminal on so many levels, that I confess i can barely keep myself calm enough to list the ways in which it is so. The current drone program Obama has conducted in Pakistan is itself a war crime, according to experts. 
But let's leave Obama's criminality out of it, and focus on his stupidity (and not even the stupidity mentioned in WaPo itself, written by someone with such a shrivelled organ of reason that he does not note the absurdity of this a mere paragraph or two down:
At the same time, the administration is trying to deepen ties to Pakistan's intelligence officials in a bid to head off any attack by militant groups. The United States and Pakistan have recently established a joint military intelligence center on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar, and are in negotiations to set up another one near Quetta, the Pakistani city where the Afghan Taliban is based, according to the U.S. military officials.
Let's leave these and other absurdities alone for now. Let's go to the roots of the so-called 'strategy' in the War in this region.
.  Why, it's getting al Qaeda/Taliban in a pincer move, of course. And the pincer is made up of us and....Pakistan's army.
I quote the man himself:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: It is important for the American people to understand that Pakistan needs our help in going after al-Qaida. This is no simple task. The tribal regions are vast, they are rugged, and they are often ungoverned. That is why we must focus our military assistance on the tools, training and support that Pakistan needs to root out the terrorists. And after years of mixed results, we will not and cannot provide a blank check. Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaida and the violent extremists within its borders. 

Read more »

James Carville, like Joe Sestak, must be a Democrat who wants to make Obama look bad.
He wants Obama's DOJ to behave as if they have spines:
Carville said the administration needs "to launch a criminal investigation -- the Attorney General needs to investigate criminal negligence on the part of BP and what went on at MMS (the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that regulates offshore drilling). There's a thousand things that he could do."

Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner is calling for an investigation into whether the Obama WH tried to buy off Joe Sestak with an Admin job after it looked like Obama favorite Arlen Specter might be primaried out by Sestak (as indeed he was).


Aside from the possible legal/ethical issues, it is, if true, emblematic of the kind of President we have: One who would have made a similar offer to keep Ned Lamont from beating Joe Lieberman in the CT primary in '06. 

Let's revisit the recent past, still too recent, perhaps, for us to savor its sublime stupidity:
Spring 2007: A National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was expected to be delivered to Congress during this period, but is repeatedly postponed as intelligence agencies re-assess information about Iran's nuclear program.
August 2007: President Bush says, "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." The latest National Intelligence Estimate says, "we assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007."
September 2007: U.S. intelligence officials, including CIA Director Michael Hayden, begin a reassessment of their information on Iran, according to unnamed officials quoted in the New York Times. The newspaper says White House officials knew at the time that the intelligence agencies were reviewing their conclusions, but did not know until later that those conclusions were drastically being changed.
October 2007: President Bush says, "we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."
November 2007: A final draft of the National Intelligence Estimate is presented to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. It concludes that Iran stopped its weapons program in late 2003 and since then has shown no signs of resuming it.
December 2007: A day after the NIE is made public, President Bush says he was first told by Director of Intelligence Michael McConnell in August that there was new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, but that he wasn't told what that new intelligence was at the time. President Bush, in a press conference, says he still regards Iran as "dangerous." He asks reporters, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?"

Read more »

I love this word. It is a kind of abstract onamatopeia. It is a kaleidoscope, a mirror in which Washington appears as it is, not as how we perceive it, nor how it perceives itself... Obama and his truculent Secretary of War  (the referent of the anachronistic title needs no clarification), and his Afghan friend Karzai, all appear in this mirror as they appear to the rest of the world- as the anocrats of this world.
What is anocracy? you ask. Well you might- my dictionary does not stock this word yet, and it may be that yours does not either. And yet, just as buzz makes the mouth tingle with its meaning, so anocracy, spoken properly, conveys its meaning through its subtle labialization -but not too subtle, I think, to be understood.
If you are in need of less sensuous definition, here goes: "a weak central government." You won't be surprised that it was introduced to the English tongue by a RAND Corp. report.
And here is anocracy!

So, apparently, the Pakistani Taliban are striking here.
Give it five or ten years. Russia is our precedent in this self-inflicted predicament, as it has been in Afghanistan. Russia has fought, for many years, a grotesque war in one of of its Islamic dependencies, and has received cataclysms of terror in return.
This will force Obama to double down still further on his tragic war against Pakistani intelligence agencies, various stripes of 'Taliban,' Greater Pashtunistan. Although the war serves no conceivable strategic purpose and cannot be won, it is politically necessary- for reasons we have already almost forgotten.

Yesterday, Ukraine decided to abandon plans to join NATO, marking a definitive end to  NATO's long march East across Europe.
Today, NATO has been dealt another blow, in which its budding Empire in Central Asia has lost a province: The Tulip Revolution has proved to be just  another case of tulip mania..
But never fear:
The upheaval raised questions about the future of an important American air base that operates in Kyrgyzstan in support of the NATO mission in nearby Afghanistan. American officials said that as of Wednesday evening the base was functioning normally.

where the joke seems to be on us.
I have to wonder....

Juan Cole gives the following report of the latest on the disputed Iraqi elections:
Sadrists are Holding Referendum on PM; Allawi says Would go to Iran, form Gov't of National UnityThe party of Muqtada al-Sadr in the Iraqi parliament, with 39 seats, intends to hold a referendum on which prime ministerial candidate to support on this Friday and Saturday, according to al-Hayat writing in Arabic....
Al-Hayat also reports that the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi is miffed that it was not invited to Iran this past weekend. He offered to go to Iran to work for a coalition, he said. Allawi expressed a willingness to go to Tehran if that is where the government is being formed. Both al-Maliki and Allawi are now showing flexibility and the willingness for the first time to form a government of national unity. 
Well, that's just great. "Willing to go to Tehran if that is where the government is being formed." (A government of national unity," no less. Which doubtless explains why it has to be formed outside the country.)This, reported without a hint of irony, as if Tehran is where people go these days for amicable settlements to disputed elections. (Maybe the irony- or ironies- are lost on Iraqis.)
But suppose it were true, and not an April Fool's Day joke on someone's part. 
OK, on to what we all thought would be Obama's signature war, the effort to prop up Karzai's fraudulent regime, and in the process keep Pakistan from tottering under the virulence of Talibs of both the indigenous and Afghan variety, plus whatever al-Qaeda remnants linger in the region. An editorial in a Pakistani newspaper says that neither Pakistan nor its northern neighbor is the true object of Obama's foreign policy in the region, because whatever failures occur there can plausibly be blamed on Bush's many years of mismanagement. OK, suppose that's true (the underlying postulate, that the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq are really about American political jockeying for advantage, is surely correct). Where is Obama really staking his Presidency? On Iran:

 US efforts failing to stabilise Afghanistan and Iraq before the end of his presidency could feasibly be blamed on their having been inherited from the previous regime. By direct contrast, however, the nuclearisation of Iran would not only derail any Obama re-election bid, it would, from a US perspective, represent the biggest American foreign policy blunder of this century. 
Meaning thereby that history would be quick to judge Obama as the man under whose watch an increased risk of war in the Middle East became a reality, under whose watch regional proliferation concerns were unleashed, regarding both state and non-state actors. In short, the man under whose watch the Middle East was reshaped in terms neither amenable to Tel Aviv nor to Washington. Indeed, as a 2008 US National Intelligence Council report noted: "Iran's growing nuclear capabilities are already partly responsible for the surge of interest in nuclear energy in the Middle East." Such setbacks the US might not feasibly overcome for at least one generation.
This explains why certain US experts on Iran have been calling for Washington to keep on the negotiating table the threat of military retaliation against rogue Iranian actions, including a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
 Never mind that we went to war with a neighbor (and archenemy) of Iran's, on the pretext that it (Iraq! Does anyone remember this?) had nukes, and which now, if Mr. Cole and/or his sources are not playing an April Fool's Day prank, anoints its political leaders in Tehran. That was the last Administration's war, and this Administration is not going to lose its laser-like focus on the true threat to national security. (Ms. Husain is appropriately dismissive of the current Afghanistan effort.)
Miranda Husain is a good writer, and she is shrewd re the true nature of Obama's 'commitment' to her region. Is it really April Fool's Day?

I know I am saying the blindingly obvious. But it needs to be said: "De-Baathification," the dismissal of the bureaucracy and military in the first days of the Occupation, precipitated the carnage that led to civil war a few years later, despite a (relatively) massive US Occupation. It is now being foisted on the Iraqis again, despite its proven track record of disaster.
And who is heading the "de-Baathification"  now? None other than Ahmed Chalabi, the shadiest character in the ME, and the man who convinced Cheney that flowers would be laid at the feet of our Army.

 We have seen, encouragingly, a sense of Iraqi nationalism that has been literally the only glue that has held a country recovering from civil war together. That nationalism, which (somewhat) transcends Sunni-Shia divides, gave Allawi his bare plurality in the election, and OF COURSE former "Baathists" were among his coalition. If you were a civil servant in Iraq before the fall of Baghdad, you were a Baath party member. If you were in the Army, you were a "Baathist" (hence the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi Army. Neocons, Feith, Perle et al., list this under "mistakes were made.") If you were a civil servant, or had aspirations/qualifications to be such, where were you, if not in the Baath Party? In Iran.( Hence the neocons' grudging "mistakes were made.") And the Iranian roots of the State of Law coalition were clearly on display last week:

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I wonder what Afghans, and others in the region, make of Obama's speech there today, in light of the recent events in Iraq:
At least four Sunni Muslim candidates who appear to have won parliamentary seats on the winning ticket of secular leader Ayad Allawi have become targets of investigation by security forces reporting to the narrowly defeated Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, according to interviews Saturday with relatives, Iraqi security forces and the U.S. military.
All four candidates ran in Diyala province, a restive mainly Sunni area north of Baghdad. One candidate who won more than 28,000 votes is being held incommunicado in a Baghdad jail, two other winners are on the run and the whereabouts of the fourth, a woman, are unknown.
Maliki alluded to the cases in his televised refusal Friday to accept a loss in the March 7 parliamentary elections, saying of unnamed rival candidates: "What would happen if some of them are in prison now on terror accusations and they participated in the elections and might win?"

It is remarkable how al-Maliki's tune has changed, as American forces abandon the country. And we will abandon Afghanistan, too.